


and still i remain

by tiansheng



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Inception Fusion, Dreamsharing, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Minor Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-15 22:20:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28945797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiansheng/pseuds/tiansheng
Summary: For all the years they’ve circled each other, Yuta knows despairingly little about Sicheng: what shores spat him up; what he dreamt of; what he would build, if he had landed himself in an endless world, devoid of anything at all.
Relationships: Dong Si Cheng | WinWin/Nakamoto Yuta
Comments: 8
Kudos: 46
Collections: Challenge #4 — Awaken The World





	and still i remain

His first two leads are dead ends, but Yuta finds what he’s looking for in Monaco. 

Xuxi is lounging on a cafe terrace overlooking the port. He looks resigned when Yuta slides into the seat opposite him, draining the rest of his red wine with a sigh. “What can I do for you, Nakamoto?” 

“You look well,” Yuta offers. 

Xuxi grunts. “I’m retired.” 

“So it’s true.” Yuta had been keeping one ear to the ground for days, hoping to catch any errant whispers, but save for Xuxi, everyone else on Kun’s team had gone radio silent after Shanghai—as if they were ghosts. 

“Look,” says Xuxi. His face is pinched, like he wants to be looking at anyone but Yuta. “I can’t give you what you want—” 

“I just need a location.” Yuta leans forward. He can see the multiplied distortions of himself doing the same, reflected in Xuxi’s sunglasses. “Come on, Xuxi, you know the sooner this is fixed—” 

“Excuse me,” Xuxi interrupts, flagging down a passing waitress. “Could I get the bill?” 

She’s back in a matter of seconds with a pen and a receipt. Xuxi takes the pen, unfolds his table napkin, and scribbles something over the back of it, sliding it over to Yuta. “You said fix, Nakamoto?” 

Yuta stares at him. Xuxi smiles once, without humour, and nods at his used napkin. “He’ll kill you if he sees you.” 

“Yeah, well.” Yuta shoves the napkin into his jacket pocket, hygiene be damned. His chair scrapes across the cobblestone when he stands. “The feeling’s mutual.” 

* * *

Crouching on the ledge of a hotel room window in Zurich, Yuta considers his options. He’d always prided himself at being good at calculating the odds. It was what kept him alive, his ability to see a detonating bomb and make a judgement call, to have a room torn to pieces around him and see percentages. 

Ten would kill him on sight: true. Ten has what he needs: true. There is no way Yuta is leaving Zurich without what he came for: also true. 

He had shadowed the team for weeks, before the extraction was set to take place in Shanghai; he knows Ten still has the plans on him, three layers of cityscape laid out in meticulous detail. He could map out the blueprints well enough for himself, but only the places where he’d been to; Ten had spent days crafting entire cities for the Liu extraction, riddled with mazes and streets that doubled in on themselves and side-doors that led nowhere, and he didn’t want to risk missing a single one. 

He calculates: he estimates a five hour headstart for himself, max, before Ten would find out he stole the plans and set out on his tail. He has enough time to get himself on a plane to Shanghai. As long as he arrives first, he can buy himself the rest. 

The address from Xuxi had led him to the right place, but it surprised him that Ten was still here. He was getting sloppy, if he’d let himself be found this easily. Yuta marvels at what he should have seen all along: it was Sicheng that bound the team together, in the end. 

* * *

Yuta had always wondered what it was exactly that Sicheng _did._ When they were both starting out, new to the game and hungry for work, he had mistaken Sicheng for hired muscle, in the way muscle was valued in dreamsharing: he was lithe and flexible, all hidden power, and he never spoke, not until they did a job together in Seoul, where Sicheng sat straight-backed and silent beside him through the entire meeting, until Yuta had brought him an extra coffee and he turned to him and said, “Thank you, hyung,” in perfect, unaccented Korean, his voice deep and clear. 

“’95,” Yuta had told him after, and when Sicheng just blinked at him: “October 26, 1995. Figured you should know before you call someone younger than you hyung.” 

“I’m from ’97,” Sicheng said, his expression unchanging. “So I wasn’t wrong, was I?” 

Dreamsharing was a small field, back in the day, and there wasn’t much space to go for freelancers; they were always bouncing between the same odd number of people. Yuta and Sicheng were forever catching each other’s tails: Goa, Taipei, Bratislava. Before he knew it, he had started angling for jobs when he knew Sicheng would be, even if the pay was worse—and, fine, maybe he’d started developing a bit of a blindspot when it came to the guy, but the math worked itself out, didn’t it? Jobs always seemed to go more smoothly when he was around. 

It had all changed when Sicheng found himself a team, of course, and Yuta remained independent, unwilling to tie himself to anyone for too long. Suddenly there hadn’t been many opportunities to run into each other, not until Yuta had been hired to protect a business magnate’s son in Shanghai from extraction, and found himself tailing Kun’s team: not the reunion he would have imagined, but he was nothing if not professional, and he’d be damned if he let them succeed, though the odds were laughable, five against one in the subconscious of an eighteen-year-old. 

He should have realized it then. Sicheng played point for a reason. They functioned well, but Sicheng was their heart. They were too scattered without him: directionless. Even when Yuta had finally tracked him down in the third level, he’d been steady and clear-eyed, so sure in what he was about to do. 

Seven of them had gone under in Shanghai. In the end, only six of them had come out. 

* * *

It’s Kun who finds him next, in the airport bathroom in Abu Dhabi, and maybe Yuta’s the one getting sloppy for not seeing him coming—he’s just pushing open the door when something slams him into the opposite wall, his vision going momentarily grey. When it clears, he finds Kun pressing into him, one arm against his chest, one arm barred across his throat. “Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you right now.” 

Yuta is strong, but Kun is furious, so he tries to remain as still as possible. “You need me,” he gets out. Shit, if Kun is here, Ten must have told him instead of setting out himself, which means he never had much of a head start at all— 

Kun presses harder. “Try again.” 

“You can have the plans back,” he gasps, feeling the uneven bathroom tile dig in through his jacket. “But you need me to get him back—I have to try.” 

“Ten’s furious,” Kun says conversationally, like Yuta isn’t on the brink of passing out. He would buy his nonchalance, if not for the raw, terrible look in his eyes, and that’s where Yuta knows he’s got him: if he didn’t believe Yuta he would have already torn him apart. “He wants you on a hit list. I almost called it in myself, when I saw you. You’re too predictable, Yuta.” 

The air in Yuta’s lungs is starting to run thin. “Not trying to hide—we both want the same thing, and you know I have a shot—” 

“That’s a lot of assumptions from a man hired to kill us,” says Kun. 

Yuta makes a sound of frustration. “A job is a job and you _know_ that—listen, just give me an hour, and I swear to God I’ll let you and Ten and anyone else have at me if it doesn’t work, but you have to let me _try,”_ and maybe it’s something in the way his voice cracks open, laden with the undercurrents of something embarrassingly honest, but Kun is stepping back, the weight against his throat gone. 

“I never saw you,” Kun says, as Yuta struggles to catch his breath, “but you had better hope for your sake we don’t run into each other again.” 

* * *

For all the years they’ve circled each other, Yuta knows despairingly little about Sicheng. 

He has all the errant details, built up over time: his morning coffee order; his long, slender fingers, capable of dismantling a lock within seconds; his totem, a miniature wind-up sparrow; and inexplicably, he knows the high tone of Sicheng’s voice when he’s raw and pushed to the edge, when he’s arched into a mattress beneath him, the smooth, muscled tone of his hips indented with his fingerprints, the curve of his shoulder under the wet bite of his mouth. The first time they’d done that, Yuta had been so dizzy with something he couldn’t name—want, relief, elation—that he had to pause and check his totem. 

He knows how Sicheng looks in a business meeting (stoic), how he looks at the other end of a barrel (unfazed), how he looks with the morning sun spilling across him, filtered through dingy motel room windows (beautiful)—but what he doesn’t know is: what shores spat him up and into the dreamshare world, what he dreamt of when he wasn’t under the PASIV, if anything at all. What he would build, if the blueprints were his, if he had landed himself in an endless world, devoid of anything at all. 

* * *

Yuta wastes no time in getting himself to Shanghai, but the closer he gets, the more he feels a weight growing heavy in his gut, tugging on him like an anchor, forming the absent shape of a man who is almost a ghost. He is approaching the body of a man whose mind is nowhere, plunged into the depths of himself. 

It’s like déjà vu, tracing the same path through Pudong Airport, hailing a taxi to the financial district, though he directs the driver to a private hospital instead of the Liu Group’s tower like last time. When he looks out the car window, he can see the cities Ten built overlaid on top of the streets. 

Sicheng is set up in a private room, funded through one of the Liu Group’s offshore accounts, though the company doesn’t know it yet: one last parting gift from them. It’s unbearably quiet in this wing of the hospital, the silence punctuated only by the soft beep of surrounding machines. Yuta lets himself into Sicheng’s room, setting up the PASIV with steady hands, checking the dosage twice, three times over. He can’t bring himself to look at Sicheng, even when he’s this close, centimetres apart, because he really isn’t there at all. Yuta hooks himself up and then Sicheng, the motion as natural as breathing, and in the space of an exhale he’s inside the dream. 

He has Ten’s plans memorized, and the first city takes shape around him, an empty, haunting echo of what happened before. He doesn’t expect to find anything, but he searches just to be sure, pacing through the wide, empty streets—and there really is nothing, so he takes the PASIV and drops into the second level, and then the third. 

Yuta had been hired to guard the subconscious of the magnate’s son at all costs, with orders to shoot to kill if necessary. It was a short-notice job: his mind was unguarded, defenceless, and there was no time to train him; Yuta would have to go down into the dream himself. It would be a standard extraction, Yuta had thought, and he knew how Kun’s team would operate, having listened in on their planning for weeks, so he’d expected Sicheng to be giving the son a heart-to-heart in the third level. 

The son must have had some repressed trauma, because Yuta had been fucking jumped by projections the second he went under; Kun’s team had been fighting them off too, all there except Sicheng. Yuta had knocked out Dejun to get to the PASIV and enter the second level, and it had all started to go terribly wrong. The son was getting paranoid, which in turn was making his projections go haywire. Yuta hadn’t wanted to risk the son accidentally shooting them into limbo, so he took him down into the third level instead, and that was where he had found Sicheng. 

Yuta stands where they had both been standing, an outcropping of rock overlooking an ocean, jewel-blue waves lapping up the cliff face. He has the PASIV in hand, the dosage ready, and he checks his totem once, and then again, his heart threatening to pound up his throat. Theoretically, he knows, it’s easier to enter limbo willingly, but he had never _done it,_ and in reality, he knows this too: Sicheng had entered willingly, and weeks later, he is still there. 

He stares at the ocean, bright and almost unreal, and he lets out a breath and goes under. 

* * *

He’s heard stories, has read scientific papers about what limbo is like: an infinite ocean, a world of nothing that goes on forever, but he’s not prepared for _this:_ Yuta is standing on a wooden pier that stretches into the horizon, the waters grey and endless around him. 

_“Sicheng!”_ He yells, and the sound is gone as soon as it leaves his lips, not even an echo: a vacuum. 

He leans over the side of the pier, dipping his hand into the water. It’s lukewarm, almost room temperature, and he doesn’t understand why this strikes him as odd until he looks at the sky and realizes there is no sun. 

With nowhere else to go, Yuta starts down the pier. He runs, then slows to a jog when he starts getting winded. There are only two possible directions to go, forward and back, but the view is forever unchanging around him to the point where he starts getting confused: has he moved at all, has he accidentally doubled back without realizing? He could have been running for days, or weeks, the grey waters blurring into one long line in his peripheral vision, the steady churning of the waves making him want to throw up. He does, but finds there is nothing to empty, and continues forward, as much as he remembers where forward is. 

At long last he sees the shore, a brown line so thin in the distance he thinks he’s dreamed it. When he gets closer he seems remnants: hollowed out shells of wooden sheds and beach huts, half-collapsed on a rocky shore. He’s looking at someone’s history. Yuta goes from one structure to the next, calling Sicheng’s name and hearing his own voice eaten by the silence. 

Nothing could have prepared him for this emptiness, which seems so perfectly engineered to drive someone insane. The shore itself is endless, too, and there are rows of crumbling buildings beyond it; he’ll have to check all of them, too. His hands shake when he tries to dig his totem out of his pocket, feeling it cut into his palm. 

“Sicheng!” He tries again, his voice hoarse to his own ears, except there he is, the wide cut of his shoulders, standing with his back to Yuta on a patch of withered grass, hands in his pockets, and he turns so slowly, like he thinks he’s still dreaming, which he is— 

“You found me,” says Sicheng, blinking down at him. 

“Sicheng,” he says, breathless, unsure if he can say anything else after calling his name for so long. “There you are—you’ve been here long enough.” 

“It’s awful, isn’t it?” Sicheng says, his voice mild. He nods at the rows and rows of collapsed structures. “I kept trying to build something, but maybe I just don’t have your penchant for architecture.” 

“Sicheng,” Yuta says again. He stretches out his hand, unsure how to breach the gap between them. “Don’t you want to come back?” 

A pause. Sicheng still has that mild, puzzled look on his face; Yuta has the sudden urge to slug him just to see any other reaction. “Back?” 

Yuta’s blood runs cold. He stares up at Sicheng, his hand still outstretched. A blade of cold wind suddenly rips through the air, the force of it almost knocking him off his feet, though Sicheng is unruffled. “Darling, where do you think we are?” 

Sicheng tilts his head slightly. “We’re still on the job, aren’t we? There was a boy…” 

He could cry; he could punch him. “That was weeks ago, darling, don’t you remember what happened?” 

He watches him bite his lip, wavering. “I…” 

“Your totem,” says Yuta. “Check the sparrow. If it flies…” 

“I told you about that,” Sicheng says, his voice wondering, and he pulls the sparrow out almost absently. It’s been years since Yuta has seen it, the blue of its wings long faded. He stares at it like he’s seeing it for the first time. “How could I forget if I was dreaming?” 

“You were ready to stay,” Yuta says, hushed, echoing what Sicheng had said back then. “Or did you forget that, too?” 

Sicheng says nothing, just presses his lips together. He winds up the sparrow and sets it on the ground. Both of them watch its wings flutter before it lands on its side, its flight path short-lived, but Sicheng is staring at it with his mouth parted. 

Yuta steps closer. “Now do you believe me?” He says, and Sicheng finally, _finally,_ takes his outstretched hand, face full of trust as he closes his eyes, even as Yuta first shoots him awake and then himself— 

It takes him a second to get his bearings, on the hospital bed beside Sicheng, but he feels warm arms encircling him, bringing him closer, and when he shifts he feels Sicheng shifting too, warm and awake. Outside, there’s the faint sound of shouting, footsteps pounding, but he hears Sicheng’s low voice in his ear and relaxes. 

“Thank you for bringing me back,” he says, and Yuta holds him close and just lets himself breathe. 

**Author's Note:**

> title adapted from this line of wayv's [nectar](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbHoaxkfkP4): “就算被全世界忘记 / 而我依然会存在” (and even if I am forgotten by the world / I will still exist).
> 
> the team:  
> kun — extractor  
> ten — architect  
> xuxi — chemist  
> dejun — forger  
> sicheng — point man


End file.
